Her throat knew how to gloat better than any other part of her body.
Her hips always had that menacing sway. Her toenails glimmered with diamond-hard top coats. Her tongue flicked her consonants out like they were the shells of sunflower seeds. But I noticed her throat first, when her head was tipped back and the muscles on her neck were pulsing through every swallow.
Boys watched her from all angles of the room; she knew what she was doing. I suspected she couldn’t put anything in her mouth without sending ripples of suggestion through all witnessing penises, but as she lowered the bottle of gin and gave a little bow to her onlookers, I knew none of them would remember her as deeply, as disgustingly as I would.
The gin tasted like a flower shop soaked in gasoline. I know because she had no qualms about passing it around, never mind the cork no one got off on the first try and the crystalline exterior. The beer from earlier had soured my stomach and I savored the little swallow of lilies and hospitals I got. I tried not to think about how my throat would look in comparison— bobbing in thankful little quivers. I jutted my head forward for the rest of the night to hide the column of muscle I didn’t know how to brag with, and she fell asleep sprawled on the couch, her head hanging over the side.
We lived in the BRamshackle— an affectionately named nightmare of unofficial Binghamton student housing. Seven skinny stories stacked together in an increasingly threatening lean, four years of missed health inspections, and two hundred fifty dollars a month. For a shared room. And a floor without a bathroom. From the seventh floor, the fastest way to get a midnight piss in was the jagged, wraparound staircase with a cumulative five missing steps. Brave the frosty temperatures and those missing steps and you could be back in bed in two minutes, snug and hundreds of dollars richer.
It took me a while to understand how a girl like her ended up in BRamshackle. I’d looked up the price of her favorite gin and she could easily live in a place with a sink that actually drained. Hell, she could live in a place with two bathrooms for every floor. But she had it all figured out long before she wound up here: her hair would look best in the sea of box dyes. Her endless expensive leftovers would be coveted. Her extensions of gin and sweaters and hair ties would have girls crumbling in their devotion.
She was a daughter born with endless possibilities, but living among children with endless limitations, she could be a god.
I’d only ever known gods that couldn’t be seen and seldom were felt, so I didn’t stop myself when I started pondering on the intestines of the god two floors below me. On the dandruff she might’ve been leaving in her hair brush. On the bruise that must’ve bloomed on her thigh when she stumbled against the dining room table.
On her throat.
She was a magnanimous god and graced BRamshackle’s constant parties with an endless flow of booze. She learned names and curled arms around any girl that sat next to her. I watched the way her hair drifted across her throat when she dropped her head onto a girl’s shoulder and wondered if I’d ever end up with her head on my shoulder. If I’d smell coconut or tangerines or just the haunting scent of her scalp. And then I’d be wondering if I’d be able to smell the kisses parents might’ve pressed there, their heavy minty breath sinking into her follicles.
When a cold slammed through all seven floors of BRamshackle, I coughed long streams of phlegm into my pillow and thought of her raw, swollen throat two floors below. From the bunk below me, my roommate mumbled something about getting tea with honey for us both, but I shouldered through the pounding in my head and got it myself. We shared a kitchen, after all. I stood over the heating vent with knocking knees while the water boiled, and I took my time mixing long spools of honey into the tea, but she never showed up. I shouldn’t have been surprised. By that time, half the house was playing maid for her while the other half—
“She’s not even that pretty.” This came from Milly, who dotted her face with moisturizer at six and six every day no matter what. “Plus, she’s definitely dropping out soon. Have you ever seen her actually going to class? When she leaves she probably won’t even say goodbye.”
I glanced at the brand of Milly’s moisturizer, slipping through my database of cataloged prices to land on something with two zeroes at the end. Milly applied it in practiced, tiny dots, so I knew the price meant something to her, but I knew she wouldn’t understand. The cost of Milly, the money her parents had doled out to her throughout her childhood, was closer to hers than it was to mine, and we’d never agree. So I just shrugged, plucked the final stray eyebrow hair, and said, “Binghamton ten, NYC six.”
Milly liked my answer even if it wasn’t objectively true. She giggled and we took the perverse pleasure girls always take when they’re saying what men have said for years. But I’d watched her too long to believe she could be anything but gorgeous. One eye was worth fifteen grand. Her hair and the scalp beneath it would cover tuition. Even the dry skin at her elbows was still enough for a plane ticket somewhere exotic.
I lingered each morning as I measured out my off-brand Cheerios and hoped she’d stumble in for her coffee. I hoped her breezy,
“Morning!” would bleed into a natural conversation, and when her throat got tired, I could raise my voice and ask what it’s like to come into the world worth millions.
According to my own personal math, my brain had accrued about ten thousand dollars of debt. More would be piling on, I knew, but I couldn’t deny that those hard-working coils deserved the biggest piece of the pie. They’d earned discounts right and left— scholarships and tax breaks and once, when it was quick enough to think up a lie, a slashed tuition for having a single mother. My brain rationalized that she may as well have been single, and I doled out another portion of my future income to congratulate my cerebrum.
My stomach sucked money like a nursing newborn, but my mother’d taught me how to shut it up on a budget. She met each grocery store with a set jaw and the fastest cart, and no matter my age or earnestness, she was ready to shoot my suggestions down. Stomaches weren’t worth cinnamon bread or soft cheese. Stomaches weren’t worth a summer popsicle or a winter cocoa.
My stomach, hard and yowling as it was, was worth twenty dollars a week, dissected down to the last penny. With every week of my life cumulating to the horrific number my stomach had claimed, I struggled to understand how any throat could be worth more than any stomach. But I learned. Maybe the honey lozenges I spotted her sucking once the colds abated didn’t add up to much, but people heaped worth onto every minute vibration of her larynx.
She hummed and people looked up. She sighed and people sighed alongside her. She yelled from the fifth floor and everyone from surrounding floors squished up or down to meet her. The breath rattling through that throat of hers had an ease I couldn’t capture even when I was alone. And she was never alone. Not when there were so many people waiting to catch her words, her laugh, her cloud of watermelon vape.
My toenails were worth 50 cents one year, and when the clipper snapped in half after years of dutiful clipping, I was told my toenails were not worth anything more. I wait till they grow long enough, make a cut on the sides with my fingernails, then pull.
My spine has never been worth a nickel.
My skin— all of it— is worth 2.99 in the summer and 1.99 in the winter. If I can scrape enough flakes of skin off in front of my mother.
My left thumb isn’t worth anything because when it popped out of place and bruised horribly, my mom popped it back in and didn’t think twice. It throbbed if I used it too much, and yet it begged to be used, to earn its keep.
I once saw her bite off a hangnail on her thumb. A little prick of blood swelled to the surface, and instead of licking it up, she rose from the couch and applied two Bandaids over the wound site. 16 cents for a half-formed blood drop. That night I dreamed I was a vampire, and once I’d filled my stomach I bought a house.
Milly was right about her. As Christmas neared, gasps and shrieks echoed from the fifth floor. Girls cried pointless, useless tears over her announcement that it was her last semester at Binghamton. It was so much fun, but she just wasn’t academically minded. Her stress levels had been through the roof, she said, but she’d finish out the semester strong.
At her final party, she swallowed mouthfuls of her favorite gin and I got up the courage to wedge into the spot next to her on the couch. She talked into the air around her, making no effort to be heard over the music. She seemed to think that the people who cared could strain their ears for her. I leaned in as close as I dared.
She also made no effort to pretend she knew my name.
But as the chloroformed lilies blurred my mind and the party grew sluggish, her million-dollar arm landed across my shoulders. “Speech!” she hollered, and whoever remained swiveled at the sound.
“I’ve loved every second in this house with all of you,” she slurred, squeezing my shoulders. “The people I’ve met…they’re gonna be the people I remember for the rest of my life!”
To prove her point, she planted a kiss on the cheek of the girl beside her. She planted a kiss on me. A smudge of residual lipgloss just under my eye.
In that moment, I thought I could tell her anything. With that faint pink mark across my eye socket I thought she’d hear my secret fascination with her birth, or my tendency to count how much it cost to wake up every day. How I’d fished change out of a drunk first floor’s pocket the first night. My calls to Mom that always started with a promise that there was no long-distance charge. The math I’d done years ago with Dad’s salary and our mortgage and the heaps and heaps of missing money. The infection in my mother’s brain that was rooting in me.
“God, I’ve become such a lightweight,” she murmured into my ear. “I could just…just pass out…”
She leaned to the left in a mush. The girl on her left had another round of shots in her and disentangled herself from us both. But I ended up squished on top of her, her arms under my arms, her hair mixed with my hair.
My head at the base of her throat.
I was surrounded by a god on all sides, with every part of me touching every part of her, but all I could think of was her throat. Around us, people kicked at the embers of the party, crushing beer cans and stumbling to the staircase. Someone yakked a floor away, but the smell of weed came rolling in before the vomit. No one noticed us there, spilled over each other on the couch. No one noticed when my fingers crawled up to touch the hard shell of her throat. No one noticed my fingers quivering, my heart racing, my eyes watering, my tongue leadening, my soul clenching with the most vicious, most luxurious wants it had ever felt.
I thought of digging my fingers in, digging her throat out. Molding it over my own to see if I could drink, eat, talk, breathe the way she did.
My fingers stroked over that powerful column until the room was well and truly empty.